"So much the better. Was Mr. Somers there?"
"We did not see him; but he had been there," said Aunt Letty. "But Mrs. Townsend found us. And who do you think came up to us in the most courteous, affable, condescending way?"
"Who? I don't know. Brady, the builder, I suppose."
"No, indeed: Brady was not half so civil, for he kept himself to his own work. It was the Rev. Mr. M'Carthy, if you please."
"I only hope you were civil to him," said Herbert, with some slight suffusion of colour over his face; for he rather doubted the conduct of his aunt to the priest, especially as her great Protestant ally, Mrs. Townsend, was of the party.
"Civil! I don't know what you would have, unless you wanted me to embrace him. He shook hands with us all round. I really thought Mrs. Townsend would have looked him into the river when he came to her."
"She always was the quintessence of absurdity and prejudice," said he.
"Oh, Herbert!" exclaimed Aunt Letty.
"Well; and what of 'Oh, Herbert?' I say she is so. If you and Mary and Emmeline did not look him into the river when he shook hands with you, why should she do so? He is an ordained priest even according to her own tenets,—only she knows nothing of what her own tenets are."
"I'll tell you what they are. They are the substantial, true, and holy doctrines of the Protestant religion, founded on the gospel. Mrs. Townsend is a thoroughly Protestant woman; one who cannot abide the sorceries of popery."